DAVIES: What did you do for fun as a kid?
LANSDALE: Well, we went fishing. We went hunting. Back then though, fishing and hunting wasn't just a recreational thing, it was something you did to eat. My father once told me - we went out - we were squirrel hunting, and we - you know, I think he saw I was getting kind of excited about it. He says, you know, this isn't a sport. Everybody tells you hunting's a sport. It's not. And he says, if you start to enjoy seeing something fall or die, you need to sit down and have a really serious talk with yourself. Said, this is to eat and that's all. And he was a - very, very racist in his speech and whatever, but you know, I was just - my mother was just the opposite. But what happened was that when we'd go squirrel hunting, he would kill two or three extra and he would bring them to a black family that he knew who were more desperate than we were, and the same thing when he went fishing. And he was always doing stuff like that. So I judged him more by what he did than what he said.
DAVIES: I've got to ask you, how do you prepare squirrel and what's it taste like?
LANSDALE: Well, you know, squirrel - people say it tastes like chicken. No, it tastes like squirrel. It's a little gamier. I used to like it. I haven't eaten one in years, but I saw "Winter's Bone," which is a really fine film and it's based on a very fine novel, but they knew nothing about preparing squirrels. They were just chopping squirrels with their fur on, you know? And you have to skin them and peel their suit off and cut their head off and gut them properly and rinse them, and then you cook them.
DAVIES: You cook them in a stew or, like, on a spit?
LANSDALE: Well, you - well, you fried them was very common, but they also can cook them in stew. You make gumbo with them. You can make dumplings. Squirrel in dumplings was a biggie. But pretty much any way that you would cook any other meat, like chicken for example, you can do the same with squirrel.
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